Suicide, even a single one, is a tragic event, and it affects all of us. Some of them are our own medics. We have all the mental health conditions as well. Our family is the armed forces. We're very tight. Any suicide is a great tragedy for all of us.
However, to be statistically meaningful, we have to collate them, as do all statisticians, in blocks of about five years, because the numbers of rare events need to be cumulative to have adequate power to have any kind of statistical significance and to be able to show that they're not due to chance. That gives us enough of a denominator and enough of a numerator, the number of suicides, to come up with meaningful comparisons.
Every five-year block since 1995 has shown no change in the statistical number of suicides. Our most recent one was from the 2005 to 2009 block at the height of the operations in Afghanistan. In fact, that rate per 100,000 is lower than it was in the two previous blocks—very slightly lower, not statistically significant enough. But, in essence, our suicide rate has not changed. We can't go by a single year, because in a single year there could be anomalies due to chance.
For example, looking at all the suicides from the start of operations in Afghanistan in 2002 until 2010, including all suicides we were able to capture, including females—which are extremely rare, and most years we don't have any—as well as reserves, although some reserves we may not capture because we don't have as close observation of them, there were a total of 108. Of those, 67 had never deployed anywhere. Of the 45 who had deployed, only 17 had deployed to Afghanistan. So the majority of our suicides, and the majority of our mental health burden—mental health illnesses—are caused by the same stresses that affect all Canadians.